Before getting sidetracked with other things, I was discussing the intriguing story of 1 Samuel 28, where the king of Israel, Saul, illicitly consults a medium in an attempt to communicate with his now-dead advisor and predecessor, the prophet Samuel. This is the only case of necromancy in the entire Bible. In this post I want to consider what the author of the passage seems to think about those who go to Sheol after death.

Recall the story: Saul is experiencing both internal turmoil (his rival David is on the rise and there is civil war) and external threat (from the warring Philistines). He wants advice about how to proceed, but there is no one to turn to. So he takes on a disguise and resorts to a medium (after having, as king, outlawed mediums!) to call up Saul from the realm of the dead.

She does as he asks. As Samuel “comes up” from the ground, the medium realizes that it is Saul who is her client and that she’s in big trouble – he is the one who has forbidden what she is doing. Samuel tells her not to fear, and asks what she is seeing. She says that she sees an Elohim (divine being, usually translated “God,” but it can refer to other superhuman beings) coming up; he is an old man, wrapped in a robe. And Saul immediately realizes it is Samuel.

Samuel is not …

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I once heard a pastor say he was OK with God commanding “kill both man and woman, child, and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” Any religion or person who is OK with killing infants, toddlers and innocent people I have a problem with. This is one reason that I have left the church and ultimately christianity.

I’ve read that at least one conservative evangelical says that it’s not immoral for God to command and people to commit this kind of genocide, apparently because God is the source of morality and what he says goes. However he also says that without God’s command genocide would in fact be immoral, apparently because it violates God’s normal standing law, eg, in the Mosaic covenant.

The issue goes at least as far back as Plato’s dialogue entitled “Euthyphro.” Is the good whatever God commands or does God command it because it is good?

Except Hitler. And Stalin. And Mao. And Pol Pot. And a lot of left-wing and/or anarchist terrorists.

If you don’t believe, don’t pretend to believe.

And don’t pretend it makes you better than anyone else. What you believe or disbelieve has nothing to do with that. It’s how you treat other people that matters. Jesus would probably agree. And it’s not as if he didn’t say anybody who would harm a child would be better off flung into a well with a millstone around his neck.

Chimpanzees have been known to murder other chimpanzees, including baby chimpanzees.

What religion do you blame that on?

Our primate nature is the problem, and it doesn’t really sound like you have an answer. Maybe nobody does.

I wonder if this sort of half-existence view of the afterlife is consistent with other post-bronze age cultures in that region. I recall the Philistines worshiped Dagon but I don’t think I’ve ever seen any further theology from them, and the Edomites seem to have been all over the map at one time or another.

P.S. I think “Saul” may have been inadvertently typed there as “Samuel” in paras 3,6

Can you briefly summarize the main OT views about an afterlife? It seems I usually hear that ancient Jews did not believe in an afterlife until rather later when the idea of the resurrection of the dead developed. But then I seem to also keep hearing qualifications, like this story about Samuel, about the earlier non-belief.

That’s certainly clear now that I’ve read it. So going to Sheol was the main idea. I wonder where I came up with the idea that absolutely no afterlife was the main idea. Maybe I conflated no afterlife with no heaven and hell.

But here’s something I don’t understand in your 3/29 post: “what is clear is that most (not all) of the writers who mention Sheol think of it as something to be avoided at all costs.”

It sounds like, with only two exceptions, it was also thought to be impossible to avoid Sheol. What’s the alternative?

Did those ancient Jews who did not believe in any sort of individual afterlife find a strong sense of continuing existence in other ways, say in their children and later descendants and in the continuation of the Jewish nation? Or did they mostly just resign themselves to death as the end?

One thing I’m wondering too is whether maybe these Jews didn’t have a strong enough sense of their own individuality to be especially bothered by death. Their identity rested strongly on being part of the nation. As long as the nation persisted death wasn’t all that horrible.

Yes, good point. The idea of living on in your children does eventually become a way of thinking about it, but I don’t know that there is much of that in the Hebrew Bible itself. (Or maybe the passages are just not occurring to me)

Their law of kinsman redeemer may reflect this. If a man dies without leaving an heir, a relative is responsible for marrying the widow to produce heirs to his estate. While this might simply be property rights law, their emphasis on genealogies and family heritage suggests otherwise.

Samuel’s state in the afterlife might be considerably better than the average person’s. This is something we see a lot throughout history–Dante can’t bear to consign his favorite pagan writers to the Inferno. And Samuel might, in fact, be having a terrible time down there (it sounds very boring), but simply disapproves in general principle of using sorcery to raise the dead. Jewish prophets were not known for their laxity in such matters, even for themselves.

I think at most what’s conveyed here is that the afterlife, in this writer’s mind, is a sort of nullity, a span that exists between death and eventual resurrection, and it’s not supposed to be interrupted. The fact that Saul would do this is further proof of his unworthiness, and the justness of God replacing him with David.

And as with Dante, I don’t think the storyteller means for this to be taken literally. It’s a fable, meant to convey a point. I mean, how would anyone even know such a thing had happened? Saul’s not going to tell anybody, and he probably had that medium killed, no matter what assurances she’d been given. 😉

If I understand you correctly, you do not believe that there was a gradual development of a common Judaic belief in the afterlife, rather, different authors had differing views, right up and including during the time of Jesus. What percentage of Hebrew Bible scholars would agree with this position?

I think there was development, certainly. But it was not unilinear. Things developed at different rates in different times and places — and soemtimes they didn’t develop much at all. My sense is that this is a common view among scholars of the Bible, outside of fundamentalists and very conservative evangelicals.

Dr. Ehrman, I think you’re missing an interesting corollary to this story. Notice that only the Necromancer sees the ghost of Samuel. Saul has to ask her what she sees. This is an interesting window into the charlatanism of ancient necromancers. Much like modern mediums, they’re engaging in a charade, where they are pretending to see a ghost, but are actually faking the ghost’s words. We see this, for example, in Samuel’s ghost’s supposed reaction to being raised. He acts as if he has been disturbed. This is clearly a detail we would expect a phoney medium to add in order to make their supposed necromancy seem real. “The ghost isn’t happy to have been disturbed!” Well, I wouldn’t be happy if I were disturbed either, so this must be real. Ancient diviners and supposed prophets were pretty much all charlatans and hucksters, just like today.

Given that this is a fictionalized history of the penultimate day of Saul’s life, I think some willing suspension of disbelief is in order. The fact that everything Saul was told came to pass suggests the author means for the reader to understand that Samuel really did speak.

A couple of things you mentioned in some earlier posts got me curious. You were discussing the possible broader implications of someone’s belief or non-belief in an afterlife. You mentioned global warming as an example. That made sense. Republicans almost reflexively deny anthropogenic climate change and I’ve always assumed they are the more religious of the two major parties. Turns out that’s not exactly true. At least according to Pew.

More Republicans than Democrats do believe in heaven; 80% to 66%. But, when you adjust for the proportion of Republicans vs Democrats the actual number of people believing in heaven would be pretty close. I found that surprising. Another thing I found odd, regardless of party, more people believed in heaven than hell; Repub 80% to 69%, Dem 66% to 51%. I would have assumed if you believed in one, you believed in the other.

Pew has done a lot of polling on issues based on religious affiliation. They even did a poll of attitudes toward climate change by religion. The two groups most accepting of human activity causing climate change were Hispanic Catholics and the unaffiliated. The group most likely to reject it was Evangelical Protestants – no surprise there. But, I’m guessing it has more to do with their need to reject science in general than where they expect to spend eternity. If your belief system requires you to reject geology, cosmology, and biology then rejecting climatology is pretty easy.

I’ve seen similar studies (and your references), but I think you have to consider that today’s Republican party is more homogeneous than in the past (though it was never so mixed as the Democrats!). For the past 30-40 years, party extremists have used the primary system to weed out moderates and free-thinkers. Add to that the way the religious right has highjacked the GOP to advance its own agenda, and it’s actually surprising that ONLY 80% of the Republicans believe in heaven!

The fact that the Torah banned necromancy and witchcraft must indicated that such practices were, if not common, at least common enough that it troubled the religious authorities. If they were though “un-Jewish,” where did they come from?

The thought that comes to mind is the prohibition in Ex. 22:17 against a sorceress, or machshaypha, which is a specifically feminine word (for those who don’t know, all Hebrew nouns have male or female gender). This implies that the Torah was more concerned with women in this position than men. And it is the source of the medieval (and modern) persecution of women for being witches.

I find a note in the Jastrow dictionary referring to the Jerusalem Talmud – Y Sanh VII 25d – citing to the text in Exodus and saying that only women are inclined to sorcery (cashfanit).

Whether this was a way of working around male domination in Judaism is not something the Talmud (or other traditional sources) would ever have admitted to, in my opinion. But there does seem to a sense here that sorcery was (largely) confined to women.

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HistoricalChristianityApril 18, 2017

I think the idea was not that only women did sorcery. Men did not want women to do sorcery because then women would compete with men in this arena. Women would be claiming abilities and authorities that men wanted to keep for themselves.

I may be looking at it from too modern of a viewpoint. I was thinking of someone who would ask a psychic to connect with a loved one. The psychic may reply, “I see a man wearing a red ball cap and smoking a pipe.” The querent confirms that’s her father, but that doesn’t mean he was actually wearing a red cap and smoking a pipe. It was only a confirmation method used by the psychic. Saul has a conversation with Samuel, but he couldn’t have been speaking directly to Samuel or he wouldn’t have asked the medium what she saw which was an old man wearing a robe. (Saul’s confirmation that it’s really Samuel.) The entire conversation is happening through the medium.
So, basically, I was thinking the old man in a robe was confirmation for Saul and nothing physical, but if Samuel’s childhood friend asked for him to be brought up, he would appear as a young boy sitting in a certain tree they used to climb as kids. The friend would have his confirmation that it was Samuel.
I’m not sure that was very clear. I may be looking too deeply into it.

In most ghost stories I’m familiar with, the ghost looks like the person it represents, even though it has no material reality. Jacob Marley, for instance, looked like Marley, but Scrooge could see the buttons on the back of his waistcoat from the front. As a matter of story telling, I think that is a necessary device to explain how one can know who the ghost is. It doesn’t necessarily mean the ghost actually has a body.

On the other hand, Elijah went “up” to heaven when God took him (2 Kings 2:11). So, there are definitely more than one view on where a righteous person goes after life. Also, funny that in the NT when people like Lazarus return from the dead nobody thinks to ask about or record their experiences of being dead. Despite Jesus’ reported appearances after death no details of the afterlife are given, leaving people to speculate. That seems like something important I’d want to know!

One way to think about it is that 99.9999% of human beings went “down” to Sheol after death, while 0.0001% gained the honor of going “up” to heaven to live with God. Going to Sheol was very, very much the rule, and going to heaven was very, very much the exception.

If that is the case, I can think of many more OT figures more than deserving than Elijah and certainly Enoch. For example, Abraham, whom God treated as a friend (I can’t think of anyone else in the Hebrew bible of whom that could be said).

Abraham was an established tradition long before Isaiah existed. As John Locke did for the American Revolution, Isaiah may have been the philosophical driving force that allowed Judaism to survive and thrive in Diaspora. His revolutionary idea of ‘God with us’ changed the mindset of Jews in Diaspora toward a god of a people, from merely a god of a geography. That may be why he was so highly revered.

Do you think that perhaps some scribe who believed in mediums and in communicating with the dead, made up this story about Saul consulting a medium, and interpolated it into 1 Samuel, so as to give credence to the practice of necromancy?

I think this is a possibility, since, in the story Saul tells the Woman that nothing would happen to her.

When you were a minister, if one of your flock had asked you about this story, asking how all this could have happened (where did the Medium get the power to do this? Why did Samuel come ‘up’ from the earth? How would the bad Saul end up in the same place as the good Samuel?, etc.), how would you have responded back then?

To the observant reader, this story opens a theological can of worms. ? ? ?

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